Last week I was watching TV and saw something that really caught my eye. It was a commercial for Special K, the breakfast cereal from Kellogg, and rather than end with a plug for the product's web site -- SpecialK.com -- it advised people to search Yahoo! for "Special K" instead. I started to wonder two things: 1. is Yahoo! paying Special K for tack-on advertising? and 2. has searching really become so natural that it is more effective to tell people to search for your site than it is to tell them to visit directly?
To the latter question, the answer appears to be a somewhat surprising "yes." Of the 10 fastest rising search terms on Google last year, 7 were for searches where adding a ".com" would have brought the user to the correct site. These are called "navigational" searches -- searches done when the user already knows exactly where he or she wants to end up -- and they make up a surprising large number of total seaches.
According to Compete last fall, navigational searches make up about 17% of all searches on average, more on Yahoo! and Live than on Google. For well-known web sites, Compete found that about 9 out of the top 10 search terms for that site tend to be some sort of variation on the domain. Surprisingly, people actually often search for entire domain names rather than type them into their browser's address bar.
After a little digging, I found that Kellogg's Yahoo! campaign actually began last December with their holiday TV commercial run. Hitwise reported that that holiday campaign boosted traffic to SpecialK.com and that almost two thirds of that traffic came from searches for "Special K." Consumers were following the advice of the ad, as well, with search traffic to the domain skewing 53% toward Yahoo!
Update: Via Allen Stern, turns out the offline/online search promotion from Special K is even older -- dating back to at least last October. He has some interesting suggestions for taking the concept even further over at his excellent blog.
While I couldn't find out which way the money was flowing, Stephan Pechdimaldji of Yahoo!'s advertising PR team told me that the Special K search campaign had a 10 times better response rate than previous campaigns the company had run on Yahoo! It's hard to say if that indicates that a call to action to search trumps a call to visit a site directly, or if only that TV ads are big traffic drivers.
Either way, search over URL seems to be a trend we're likely to see more of. Advertising search boxes rather than .com names is already all the rage in Japan. Mac developer Cabel Sasser pointed out in March that search boxes with suggested terms are pretty much all you see on ads in Japan, but he wondered if search marketers and spammers might ruin that strategy in the US. That's probably why Kellogg bought the top sponsored result for "Special K" on Yahoo! (and, for good measure, on Google as well).
Still, with the continued rise of the mobile web it would seem that long, unwieldy URLs will become even more cumbersome on devices with limited screen size. That makes search even more important, and driving consumers to your product via search seems like a safe bet.
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These results do not surprise me, mostly by witnessing the way my father surfs the web. He commonly confuses the address bar with the built-in search box many of today's browser configurations have, and viola! Navigational search.
Posted by: Michael Beck | May 22, 2008 8:50 AM
if you google special K, the second result is this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine
absent from yahoo's page 1...lol
Posted by: adam | May 22, 2008 8:55 AM
@ Adam. I think this shows why this is still a dangerous tactic
With the proliferation of negative forums, Get Satisfaction, facebook groups, and even anti corporate websites, this can be a dangerous game to play.
Although most people I know, regardless of knowing the site, will type it in regardless into a search engine just to see what else is out there on the web. So the point might be moot.
Posted by: Doug van Spronsen | May 22, 2008 9:08 AM
There are a lot of websites nowadays. Or maybe people today are lazy to remember URLS.
Posted by: Syahid A. | May 22, 2008 9:12 AM
Considering the (growing) number of people using Firefox, the conclusion being drawn here may be inaccurate. Typing "amazon" into the address bar of Firefox completes an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search on Google, sending the user to amazon.com.
It's a shortcut I use often. I got to this site by typing "readwriteweb" in the address bar.
Posted by: Steve S. | May 22, 2008 9:17 AM
That's really interestig stuff. Makes you think about how universal search also is not starting to have an impact on how people are promoting their products in different ways
Posted by: Nick Sutton | May 22, 2008 9:24 AM
@Steve: That's a fair point... but not sure if it follows through. Firefox is still only about 15%-25% of the market, depending on who you believe. And that only explains Google (which has a lower percentage of navigational searches then other search engines). How do you explain the trend toward navigational searches on Yahoo! and Live?
You could be right, though, that a percentage of navigational searches are coming via search engines connected to the browser nav bar.
Posted by: Josh Catone
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May 22, 2008 9:35 AM
I've read some months that using keywords instead of URL's is becoming common thing in Japan: In this article you'll see some examples http://www.cabel.name/2008/03/japan-urls-are-totally-out.html
Posted by: tito | May 22, 2008 9:36 AM
While interesting, I'm almost positive it would be more effective for smaller websites/organizations to hand out their URL, as it could be possible that simply searching for the name of the website could give your users tons of unrelated web pages to sift through before they arrive at their intended destination.
Posted by: Jeremiah | May 22, 2008 9:37 AM
Josh - I wrote about this last October:
http://www.centernetworks.com/specialk-ads-on-yahoo
I think that if Yahoo was smart they would be doing a ton of these deals. In fact, the page should be completed stylized to Special K.
When I proposed my suggestions on improving Google at iMedia - this was one of my suggestions. Let brands own their search results and customize it as they see fit. I used Coca-Cola as my example but Special K works as well.
You do raise a good question - just which way is the money flowing.
Posted by: allen stern | May 22, 2008 9:37 AM
@Allen: Ah, the ad campaign is older than I thought -- I add an update. It looks like they're marking the sponsored results now, though.
Posted by: Josh Catone
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May 22, 2008 9:41 AM
I suspect the reason that the proportion of navigational searches on Yahoo! and Live is higher than that of Google is that the users of Google tend to me more technically literate.
This is a sweeping generalisation with very little evidence to back it up, but I am guessing that more tech-savvy users know that Google tends to produce better results, and are aware of its status as market leader to a greater extent, hence are more likely to chose it over its rivals. Less savvy users may stick with Yahoo! and Live as their browser/ISP portal defaults, hence the confusion with the address bar mentioned earlier.
Posted by: Huw Leslie | May 22, 2008 9:43 AM
I've been doing this for about 6 months, telling people who want to find my blog to just go to Google and type "Wordout". It's so much easier than "http://worodut.computergeekservices.net" and although it took a bit of effort to wrestle the top spots from Wordout.com and Wordout.net it works. At first I would have to tell them to look for it down the page, but within a couple of months I could just say search Google and click the top link. According to Feedburner and Google Analytics, I get visitors from that search term every day.
I also get visitors form the search term "t". What's that about?
Posted by: Jon | May 22, 2008 10:03 AM
oof, can't even spell the URL right myself... which is why I started telling people to use the search shortcut.
Posted by: Jon | May 22, 2008 10:04 AM
This might be obvious, but this will only work for brands that command the top several spots.
It's an odd trend too - typing specialk.com isn't really any harder than typing specialk. In fact, the search takes more work.. go to Yahoo.com, type specialk, click Search vs go to specialk.com
Posted by: rick | May 22, 2008 10:33 AM
short domain squatters
Posted by: SteveR | May 22, 2008 10:40 AM
You also have to keep in mind that in this conversation you are only talking about big brands. (btw; if you saw the Masters you noticed that IBM owned all the sponsorhip and every commercial told the viewer to google rather than url.)
The reality is that brands are becoming less important. Would Special K win any of the millions of searches associated with diets? Why not? Shouldn't they be targeting these terms as well?
Chris Baggott
CEO
Compendium Blogware
www.compendiumblogware.com
Posted by: Chris Baggott | May 22, 2008 11:01 AM
For quite a long time I have repeatedly seen different different users typing "yahoo mail" typed as an argument in the Google search form ! I would have thought that http://mail.yahoo.com/ or http://www.yahoo.com/mail/ or http://yahoo.com/mail or whatever other variations that have been setup by Yahoo provide enough obvious ways to reach the service. But apparently they don’t.
If even the most obvious addresses of all are not entered, we may conclude that today’s casual user does not memorize any URL anymore. Maybe the clean URL that we strive to produce are intended for the sole consumption of search engines and power users.
Posted by: Jean-Marc Liotier | May 22, 2008 11:17 AM
Even crazier, sites run ads against searches for their own domain, basically paying the search engines to do what they'd do anyway. See also:
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/billion-dollar-javascript/
Posted by: Jesse Boyes | May 22, 2008 12:22 PM
I think promoting search rather than a URL makes sense on two levels. First, search engines generally know when we've misspelled something. "Specil K" gets me to their site on Yahoo, but specilk.com in my address bar gives me an error, and at that point I may or may not try again.
Second, and this isn't necessarily the case for these major brands, but I have a lot of things to remember, and the URL for Special K isn't one of them. Was it specialk.com or special-k.com or maybe it was specialkcereal.com? Yahoo knows better than I do.
Posted by: Jason C | May 22, 2008 12:28 PM
I've often wondered about this. My wife, for instance, will type "yahoo" into the Safari search field in order to get to yahoo.com. She does it for every site she visits. I can't remember the last time I saw her type in a URL. And I don't think she's alone in this. In a way, it makes sense. At the cost of just a single extra click, you can (1) type fewer characters and (2) not have to worry as much about spelling errors and typos.
Posted by: aaronpowell.myopenid.com
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May 22, 2008 12:31 PM
I'm pretty sure Nissan was the first to do this on their TV commercials when they had their "shift_2.0" campagin and it was with Google. Either way I think this is great advertising and helps out the site with natural search rankings.
Posted by: Jonathan | May 22, 2008 1:37 PM
That's great for sites that have been indexed decently. I'm just launching a site and did a trial adwords run. Now, there are 30 something search results for my domain name and guess who's at the bottom. ME!
I will definitely be interested in trying something like Special K is doing.
Posted by: Yaacov | May 22, 2008 1:41 PM
Just type in AOL Keyword...
Posted by: Anrkist | May 22, 2008 1:42 PM
I think this is actually a very good idea on how to advertise. I wrote about a similar partnership that is still running over at my blog: http://www.marketing.fm/2008/03/19/honda-and-yahoo-teamup/ where Honda requested people to search Shop Honda. This opened up the special video ad that is showing up for Special K. This has to be a partnership between the two companies - but one that makes a lot of sense.
Posted by: Eric | May 22, 2008 1:47 PM
with domain squatting and better search (hopefully recommendation & semantic) a proper domain name won't be a modern day necessity. Of course a hot domain name will always have a high value, and be easy to remember, with less chance of someone else stealing your potential visitor.
I think it would be cool if ICANN started making domain suffixes for airport codes to represent different major geographic areas. The location driven domains suffixes could empower a whole new location based addressing layer to the web. local businesses with common names could have a unique domain to their own city.
maybe i'm off my rocker?
Posted by: michaellambie.org
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May 22, 2008 2:11 PM
Could it be that they want a simple way to measure the traffic generated via offline media? That would be a pretty cool way to track rather then sending someone to your website from a commercial - with no way to track where or why.
Posted by: Brian Blankenship | May 22, 2008 2:51 PM
Interestly we noticed that some visitors of http://www.happytutors.com searched Happytutors through Google first and then visit our site through the google result - they probally have known us from somewhere and then decided to Google first to see if HappyTutors.com really exists or want to know if HappyTutors.com has been indexed in Google?
For ebusiness, prospective customers/clients would like to know if your site is popular on the search engines, therefore it is logical and reasonalble for them to search you first instead of type your URL directly :-)
HappyTutors.com
~ Connect Tutors with Students & Parents ~
Posted by: HappyTutors.com - Connect Tutors with Students & Parents | May 22, 2008 3:34 PM
I know that to be the case looking at my own search engine traffic (the most popular terms - the name of my site, next most popular - same name with a space between words, third most popular, incredibly, is the complete URL with .com at the end).
My question is this: what if Google decides to block all searches from people specifically looking for your site? Or even simpler, what if they decide to put some other site at the top? If I am not mistaken, they already did something like that once with BMW.de (as punishment for including hidden text in their site).
Posted by: Teleks | May 22, 2008 3:50 PM
We looked into this issue using Hitwise data and the results were pretty conlcusive. What we term 'navigational search' has increased by 30% over 2 years:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/04/google_uk_trademark_changes_navigational_search.html
All of the top search term last year were navigational:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/04/top_10_uk_search_terms_social_networks_dominate.html
And the volume of searches on the top navigational searches is also increasing rapidly:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2007/12/long_tail_evolution.html
Robin
Posted by: Robin Goad | May 23, 2008 1:34 AM
I seem to have a habit of remembering stacks of URLs. I think there must be something wrong with me!
Posted by: Spuds | May 23, 2008 1:41 AM
Anyone remember RealNames? This is exactly what the RealNames business model was banking upon -- that people wouldn't want to type in full URLs, but that they'd opt for a single keyword instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames
I suppose you could call it the equivalent of AOL Keywords but for the entire web (or at least that's what they were hoping for).
Posted by: Michael Madej (Digital Marketing Rucksack) | May 23, 2008 6:26 AM
thanks :)
Posted by: isim hakkı | May 23, 2008 7:09 AM
I think they did it because it's easier to track efficiency of their TV campaign this way.
Posted by: Dmitry | May 23, 2008 12:44 PM
@ Brian - "Could it be that they want a simple way to measure the traffic generated via offline media?"
That's friggin cool, I never thought of that!
Also, I think that it increases branding. People are used to doing search, if Special-K can change people's habits to click on their search results, it may increase recognition of their website / brand enough that if the user sees their result a different time, that the user will be inclined to click on their ad first.
In other words, if you look at special-k as a different brand from their site, since people are familiar with clicking on special-k (and obviously, if they've searched for special-k online, many pf them also search for things that special k has content and services about), they will be able to increase visits to their site on other search terms as well.
Posted by: David - About Results Marketing | May 23, 2008 3:00 PM
Just my two cents, but watching some of my clients type in their OWN website, they often use Google/Yahoo/MSN (or a toolbar that they somehow allowed to be installed or came already installed on their new laptop.
Personally, I think some of this increase is because, as has been the case since the internet birthed, more and more noobs/non-geeks are on the net. With the advent of broadband, the internet is dominated by non-technical people who can barely figure out their email, but feel compelled never to learn it or improve because, after all, they aren't "computer geeks". Yet, uh, they have a computer. And email. And a MySpace page even sometimes. [brrrr... shiver]
I don't think "smart people", by which I mean, those of us who read this blog, do this. We actually understand the difference between the Address Bar (or URL bar as I like to call it) and a search box. We disable the "automatic search" in Internet Explorer, if we even use the cursed browser at all. (Although I hear Firefox wants to integrate the two into one... grrrr!)
But not so with your average Best Buy customer. The main reason I avoid Best Buy is because while browsing I overhear stuff like the "sales force" (read: World of Warcraft dorks) telling business owners in their 40's and 50's that they need to buy all this spyware, virus, and backup software with their new Vista laptop because Vista is insecure and if they get on the internet with it, their machine will immediately be consumed by viruses and crash. I am not lying. And these business owners, who probably have businesses grossing $250k/year and up but aren't "computer savvy", pay for the crap software and walk out the door with a $900 laptop and $300 of crap. I so desperately find myself wanting to "save" them that I'm unable to function and can't even focus on why I went there in the first place. Thank goodness for TigerDirect.
Thus, when I see people using their search engine form, some even pushing their down-arrow and telling me "it's in my history here somewhere" (as if the form memory is now the browser history - sigh!), I just lose all hope. I have to to stop by a park on the way home and just watch the birds, the children laughing and playing, the mothers chatting amongst themselves - just to restore my faith in humanity.
Posted by: Lawrence Salberg | May 23, 2008 10:46 PM
Yep - this doesn't surprise me one bit... i have been preaching this advertising tactic to clients for months now.
Posted by: Daniel Kagan | May 26, 2008 1:52 AM
Just to point out - while people may type the word into the search box - they would not find the result unless the result pages were well optimised - and this includes having a meaningful url - so in this sense the url is certainly not dead.
Posted by: Richard Igoe | May 27, 2008 5:11 AM
There's no doubt URLs are becoming unwieldly. All the good ones are taken and marketers are stooping to new lows to try and stand out. In fact, I started a blog to point out all the things marketers are doing wrong (and right) with the URLs they choose and how they promote them.
That said, the only thing worse than a bad URL is not including an URL in your ad and sending your customers and prospects on a search engine scavenger hunt. As I said in
this post covering Hellman's use of similar tactics via Yahoo, marketers are playing with fire here. They can't control the search engine results page environment -- it's too easy for competitors to worm their way onto those pages. Next thing you know, you're sending people to search for your brand and they're finding your competition.
Play it safe and stick with the URL. It may be hard to find a good one these days but it's the only surefire way to make sure your audience can connect with you. Besides, if you've optimized your website properly or bought paid search ads, you'll come up when people can't remember your URL and Google your brand or product.
Posted by: Aaron Goldman | May 28, 2008 6:51 AM
Anrkist is right. AOL has been using keywords as URL replacements for well over a decade, and was the first form of search to which most of the Internet-going public was introduced. Nothing new under the sun...
Posted by: Dan | May 28, 2008 7:16 AM